Writing Quotes - Page 21

• All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Stolen

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• Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

  William Faulkner

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• After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

  Philip Pullman

  Book, Mind, Stories

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• The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

  Judy Blume

  Book, Character, Care

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• You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.

  Maxim Gorky

  Children, Adults, Way

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• Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

  Stephen King

  Kings, Imagination, Should

  FaceBook post by Stephen King from Nov 10, 2013

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• There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place.

  J. K. Rowling

  Inspirational, Inspiring, People

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• To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Crafts, Difficult, Be Good

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• To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

  William Gibson

  Real, World, Polymaths

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• The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him

  Thomas Ligotti

  Fate, Hands, Stories

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• Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

  Wallace Stegner

  Practice, Skills, Knack

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• As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

  Stephen King

  Art, Fun, Practice

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.178, Simon and Schuster

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• For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.

  A. A. Milne

  Editing, Long, Brain

  Winnie-the-Pooh ch. 4 (1926)

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• The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

  Sydney Smith

  Mistake, Dinner, Scandal

  Sydney Smith (1848). “The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith: Three Volumes Complete in One”, p.343

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• I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

  William Carlos Williams

  Thinking, Disease

  Quoted in Newsweek, 7 Jan 1957.

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• I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought.

  James M. Cain

  Wish, Reason

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• That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

  Renata Adler

  Sleep, Phones, Self

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.30, New York Review of Books

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• [Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

  Terry Pratchett

  Fiction, Way, Mainstream

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• Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Fiction, Stories

  "Lectures on Literature".

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• All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Criminals, Horrible, Feels

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• Long patience and application saturated with your heart's blood-you will either write or you will not-and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.

  Jim Tully

  Heart, Blood, Long

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• Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

  Arthur Quiller-Couch

  Pieces, Crafts, Murder

  On the Art of Writing "On Style" (1916)

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• Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Labels, World

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• Never throw up on an editor.

  Ellen Datlow

  Editors

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• There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

  L. Sprague de Camp

  Children, Brain, Faces

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